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Espionage Deck
🕑 Added 2025-07-10 15:35:07 +0000 UTCWondrous item, rare
This deck of cards resembles and can be used as a standard playing card set, complete with four suits (clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades). Each suit, like a normal deck of playing cards, has 10 numbered cards and 3 face cards (Jack, Queen, and King), for a total of 52 cards. The back of each card is dark black and painted with gold ink. The deck comes in a small and nondescript black box; you can see a gold star on the center of each card's back while the box is on your person.
You can use an action to place a card on another creature. If the creature is unwilling, you must first make a Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) check against its passive Perception score. On a success, the card is secretly placed on a creature and becomes invisible and intangible. On a failure, the creature is aware of the card, which magically and immediately returns to the deck box. If you played cards with the target creature within the last 24 hours, you have advantage on the Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) check to place a card on it. A placed card creates a magical duplicate of itself in the box, allowing you to continue playing with a full deck—the star on the back of a duplicate card is white, instead of gold. Record which cards you place (including where you place them), as well as which cards are magically returned to the box. A duplicate card remains until the original returns to the box.
While the deck box is on your person, you always know the general direction of any card you place, as well as which card it is, provided the card is on the same plane of existence as you. Alternatively, you can use an action to hold a duplicate face card to your forehead: while you do, you are deaf and blind with regard to your own senses, but can see and hear through the original face card using your normal senses. The effect ends when the card is removed from your forehead (no action required). Once this property has been used on a card, it can't be used on that card again.
A placed card returns to the box after 7 days have passed or when it's discovered (such as by a detect magic spell or similar magic). Alternatively, you can use a bonus action to speak the deck's command word while holding either a duplicate card or the box. If you're holding the duplicate card, the original one magically disappears from its placement and reappears in the deck box. If you're holding the deck box, every placed card magically returns to it instead. Once a card returns to the box, it loses its magic. A card without its magic loses the star on its back.
When found, there is a 50 percent chance that 1d12 random cards from 1 of its suits have already lost their magic.
Zinna sat down at the table with the ambassadors, who were enjoying a drink after the gala. It didn't take much to get a game of cards started, and she put on a great showing of being an inept gambler.
Not to worry, though. Later, she'd find their rooms to reclaim her losses—and fulfill the contracts on their heads.
No one could have guessed when they were dealt in that the game didn't really start until it was over.
Comments
The Griffon's Saddlebag
I really like making the occasional art for a face card—I think it's the second one I've done. Some day maybe I'll make full decks!
N. K.
This deck looks so cool, I wish I could get a physical copy of it and a sister deck with the white stars
David S.
It occurs to me in a more "technologically" advanced setting like say Eberron or higher, this sort of magic, if it could be permanently put on say pillars or obelisk at various locations and potentially tied to multiple decks (or some other system of tokens) with each card tied to a specific obelisk, could form the basis for what amounts to an early magical GPS. That would be super useful in general, but it would be game changing for ocean navigation (especially if mechanical clocks haven't been invented yet or the size of the world hasn't been semi-accurately calculated yet). Fun and useful item as is though 👍👍
